5 - ALBERTUS MAGNUS: A LOGICO-EMANATIONIST FIGURE AS A MEANS OF ACCEPTING PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHY INTO THE CHRISTIAN, PLATONIST TRADITION

Summary

The crisis of adaptation to the arrival of the new Aristotelian thought can be seen at its most intense, not in the unrest at the universities: the student strikes, the episcopal enquiries; nor among the modestly endowed innovators and traditionalists who made up the majority of the teachers – who repeated what they had learnt (whether heterodox or orthodox), but in the thought of two theologian-philosophers, both early members of the Order of Preachers founded by St Dominic in 1216, master and pupil, both subsequently declared to be ‘Doctors’ of the Church, both (owing to the challenge of the times) understandably voluminous in their writings: the Swabian Albertus ‘Magnus’, and the Lombard-Neapolitan Thomas Aquinas.

In considering the antecedents of their ideas the passive model of ‘influence’ is completely inappropriate, for with both there was a creative response to the intellectual confusion caused by the arrival in Christendom of the discordant Aristotelian thought, together with the lesser discord discernible among the peripatetics themselves. With Albert (?1193–1280) himself, the fusion of Platonist and Neoplatonist elements in the Christian tradition with peripapetic ideas is not only clever, but, given the forcefulness with which seemingly contrary, even mutually critical, theses were taken from their contexts and reassembled together in a unity, insistent and aggressive.